![]() Anytime you see a new poll, check to see what the pollster said previously before declaring that the race has shifted. (If you’re not sure if a pollster is trustworthy and want us to do some investigating, feel free to email us at Avoid comparisons between pollsters. If a pollster doesn’t show up in our pollster ratings, it’s probably new on the scene, which means you should treat it with more caution because it doesn’t have an established track record we can judge at worst, it might even be fake. 2 These gold-standard polls tend to be the most accurate, although there are exceptions - some online pollsters, like YouGov, are quite reliable as well. ![]() In our view, the “gold standard” of polling methodology is using live phone interviewers, calling cell phones as well as landlines, and participating in the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s Transparency Initiative or the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research archive. You can check which are which using the FiveThirtyEight pollster ratings, which assign (most) pollsters a letter grade based on their historical accuracy and whether they follow best practices in their methodologies. Some pollsters have long-standing reputations for accuracy, and others are more error-prone. So the next time you come across a poll and are wondering what to make of it, just follow these 10 steps. But don’t worry - it doesn’t take an advanced degree in statistics to interpret polling in a smart way. Problem is, it can be hard to know which polls to trust or how to make sense of them all. We’re about to enter the thick of general-election season, which means we’re about to get a boatload of polls.
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